Von Cheep Cheep a small Easter Egger hen packed with attitude. We named her Von Cheep Cheep because she had an almost cartoonish mischievous little face when she was a baby. We also knew that she was plotting to take over the world.
Baby Von Cheep Cheep
I mean, just look at that face!! She should be wearing a tiny little lab coat while she paces back and forth brainstorming in her tiny evil lair. She looked like this for her first 2 months.
And now she’s a full-fledged bearded lady!
Clearly, she now looks far less serious. And the chickens were smart enough to assign her to be one of the top chicken-to-human reps in the coop, she’s one of the first chickens to run out with demands. She will also fly up and sit on your shoulder if you’re taking too long feeding the chickens in the morning.
Von Cheep Cheep the bearded lady.
And best of all…
…she’s a blue egg layer!!
She started laying last week, just a few weeks shy of turning 6 months old. (Birthday was Feb 28) She lays the brightest blue eggs. Small eggs from a small bearded chicken.
We have really been getting into chicken “husbandry” this year. What exactly does that mean? Well, we have seen the egg shell color possibilities on Instagram and our working to expand ours. The chicken ladies on Instagram get real nerdy scientific with it and we’re both kind of obsessed with the possibilities.
Our current egg color selection. It’s a mini-rainbow!
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not taking our current ladies for granted! They do great work. We love the different shades of tan, white, pink and brown they give us. We just want to add a little more pizzazz to what we can offer our farmers market patrons. Because it’s fun. And we love pretty things.
Eggshell color is all about genetics.
So because of that we have researched chicken breeds and how to cross them to make different egg shell colors. We recently purchased Black Copper Marans, Cuckoo Marans and Welsummer chicks from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa to provide us with a dark chocolate egg…
Marans have a beautiful chocolate brown egg.
Aren’t they gorgeous?
For the blue eggs needed for our rainbow, we ordered 4 Easter Egger chicks. 3 females and 1 male. And we also purchased 8 Whiting True Blue eggs from a farm in Florida and 6 Cream Crested Legbar eggs from a farmer in Pennsylvania. We are currently incubating all 14 and they should be hatching within the next week
How many chickens is too many?
I know what you’re thinking, “that’s a lot of chickens!” But really it’s not going to be. Our coop is set up to more than accommodate the chicks we bought from the hatchery. Plus the hatching rate for successfully incubating eggs is only about 40%. So we’ll be lucking to 5 out of the 14 we incubated. We’re good on space, but I admit that I’m a certified chicken lady. That being said we have well over 30 chickens right now.
Egg husbandry chart for colors:
This shows how to cross chicken breeds to create fun egg colors.
As you can see; the process is fluid and there’s no guaranteed result, but that’s the fun of it! We will have special chicken runs built to facilitate this process. And we specifically bought a Black Copper Maran male, Cuckoo Maran male and an Easter Egger male. The breed that comes from crossing a dark brown layer with a blue layer is generally referred to as an Olive Egger, and the olive/green tint varies vastly.
Green eggs chart.
So there’s your crash course in the wild world of chicken breeding for egg colors. We will have dark brown and blue eggs added to our current colorful arrangement by late summer. And olive, green and mint colored eggs by next Spring. We will also be selling fertilized eggs for people who would like to incubate and raise their own special Oliver Eggers. Keep a lookout for us!
